Everyone who runs a website or even a blog would like to know if people are actually consuming their content. If you don’t want to go overboard and use a tool like Google Analytics, you’ll need to opt for one of the more minimalist solutions. Koko Analytics is one such option.

I am a big fan of small plugins that run quietly in the background of my websites and make them better. And today’s plugin, Fewer Tags, fits perfectly into this category.

Since the decline of Twitter, the social media landscape has become much more fragmented. While I have been happily active in the Fediverse for several years and plan on keeping it like that, I still have an eye on developments at Bluesky and Thread. I focus on new ways the cool kids post updates, newsletters, and podcast episodes these days.

To facilitate posting on Bluesky, Daniel Post has developed a small experimental plugin called Autoblue.

While preparing for this series of posts, I asked for plugin recommendations in a post on the fediverse. As expected, there were some real surprises among them. One of those is today’s featured plugin: Find My Blocks.

The plugin’s name, likely inspired by Apple’s “Find My” feature, hints at its purpose: helping you locate specific blocks within the content on your website. Developed by Morgan Hvidt, the plugin makes finding and managing any blocks in your site’s content easy.

For years, I used Limit Login Attempts on all my websites to make it harder for potential attackers to brute-force their way into my login page. The original developer discontinued the plugin, which was forked and continued as Limit Login Attempts Reloaded. Over time, the plugin became increasingly intrusive, constantly drawing attention in the WordPress admin area to advertise paid add-ons.

What I really wanted was a plugin that prevents brute-force attacks by adding a delay after several failed login attempts. After growing dissatisfied with Limit Login Attempts Reloaded, I decided to build my own plugin to do exactly what I needed: Protect Login.

Every text string for WordPress core, plugins, and themes must be translated if an admin decides to run a non-English website. For the WordPress core and the vast majority of plugins and themes, all strings are initially in (US) English. If someone uses WordPress without any language packs, that’s exactly what you’d see.

In most European countries, however, using WordPress in a language other than English is common. To accommodate this fact, WordPress downloads language packs in the background created by volunteers. If a language pack is incomplete or a specific plugin doesn’t have one, WordPress automatically falls back to displaying the (usually) English original.

This is where Pascal Birchler’s Preferred Languages plugin comes into play.

Plenty of solutions are available to announce events on a WordPress website. Some offer sophisticated integrations with external services, others work with plugins like WooCommerce, and some include a whole suite of features like seat booking, barcode check-ins, and more.

The plugin we’re featuring today for the KrautPress Advent Calendar does (almost) none of that. Instead, it successfully focuses on one thing: event management. The plugin we’re looking at is called Event Organiser.

Anyone building and running a website for personal use will rarely face the need to generate example content. However, those who occasionally build websites for clients or even need to showcase their own plugins or themes are familiar with the issue: content is required, and it should ideally represent what might actually appear on an actual website.

Honestly? I’m not a big fan of snowfall animations on websites. However, a festive plugin that does exactly that has spontaneously made its way onto our Advent calendar list.

This plugin by Felix Arntz is called Snow Fall and is so new that it hasn’t even been added to the official plugin directory on WordPress.org yet. However, you can download a working version from the plugin’s GitHub repository.

This post is part of our advent of plugins 2024.

Anyone maintaining a blog for years, constantly publishing new content, and writing about current events or world affairs may be familiar with the problem: content ages and, after one, three, or perhaps five years, no longer holds the same relevance as it did at the time of publication.
Simply deleting content is not a viable option for most. This would break backlinks from other sites and social media and contradict the log aspect of a (we)blog. And, at least for me, there is some pride in the public archive of my work.